Version 2.2 has been released

I’m pleased to announce that version 2.2 of Mizuu has been published to Google Play. Lots of things have been changed, improved and introduced with this version, so I can’t wait for you guys to try it out. Here’s a brief break-down of some of the changes.

Sync with Trakt.tv

Many of you are using Trakt.tv to keep track of your favourite movies, TV shows and what you want to watch next. Some of you may even have been using it for several years, and have built up an extensive library of which movies and TV show episodes you’ve previously watched. Mizuu will now synchronize the data from Trakt.tv with your local library on the device.

Each time you perform a library update – either movies or TV shows – Mizuu will synchronize that library with your library at Trakt.tv. It’s a 2-way synchronization, so you’ll get everything from Trakt.tv and your local library of favourites, watched movies / episodes and watchlist will be reflected on the Trakt.tv website.

All you need to do is set up your Trakt.tv account in the Settings screen of Mizuu, and you’ll be good to go.

Scheduled library updates

Many of you have requested a way for Mizuu to automatically perform library updates with set intervals, and that’s coming with version 2.2. A new settings pane has been added that allows you to set up scheduled updates, and you can handle movie updates separately from TV show updates.

Mizuu will allow you to perform scheduled updates at application launch or at a set interval. The intervals are every 6 hours, 12 hours, day and week. Also, a new application permission has been added in order to start scheduled updates, if enabled, when booting your device device. Please note that the update will not start immediately after system boot as the interval timer resets.

Updated application style

I’ve been making some changes to the visual style of Mizuu. The theme colour is now darker, and there’s even greater focus on your content now. The changes are rather subtle and you might not even notice some of them, but I’m hoping it’ll improve the user experience even more.

Google TV is getting some love

Mizuu has offered experimental support for Google TV since version 2.0, and while some features are still a bit rough on the edges, this release will improve the user experience on Google TV quite significantly. I’ve worked a lot on improving navigation within the application using a remote, and it’s a lot better now. Still not perfect, but a lot better.

In order to improve the experience on Google TV, I’ve disabled the grid view style for TV show seasons. Users on Google TV will now only be able to browse TV show seasons using the list view. When selecting an episode from the list, Mizuu will now focus the play button of that episode, so the next press of the OK-button will start playback of the selected episode. Same thing happens with movies. Also, you can now – again – collapse and expand TV show seasons using the list view style.

Local content will now be shown if available from actor movies and movie lists from the web

Made it possible to collapse / expand TV show seasons in list view mode

Made it possible to manually identify several unidentified TV show files at once

Replaced the trailers tab with a menu item

Updated application theme

As always, the update is available on Google Play, and the free version will be updated within a few days. There will likely be a minor update within a few days to fix any potential new bugs.

Beta releases might be returning

The Google Play team recently announced that developers will now be able to upload release versions, beta versions and even alpha versions of their applications to Google Play. I might take advantage of the feature in the future to push beta updates to users. This will be a paid-only feature, so it won’t work with the free version. Also, you’ll likely need to be subscribed to the Google+ community, but I’m not entirely sure about it, so I’ll return with more information about that.

Info on the next version

The next large version of Mizuu will be version 2.3. I’m planning on releasing this near the end of next month. The development period will be slightly longer than the promised 1-month period, but I’ve got a few important things to do – both in Mizuu and in real life. Besides, the planned features are rather large and complex, so it’ll take a bit longer to do.

you are really fast with updates! thats fine. i wont to send you a Bug.
In the TV-Shows when i long press on a Episode (in both views) then it goes also to the episodedetails and make the “Mark as seen” possible. Please have a look. The other things are very greate!!! all Changes are realy usefull and make your app to the BEST in this area!!!

Is it possible to send to trakt.tv all movies are in the collection of mizuu?

I’m not sure I fully understand what’s wrong. Long-clicking on an episode from the list / grid should select the episode and bring up the contextual action bar items.

Mizuu will synchronize the movies you’ve watched, your favourites and the ones in your watchlist. Trakt supports lists, but there isn’t one called “Movies in my library” or similar by default, so I can’t do something like that.

To the first point: yes it should do this, but also it brings up the details of the episode like i touched short on it.
The second one: i mean on Trakt the Movie in collection. but if this is not supported is ok so far.

I purchased mizuu with the release of version 2.2. I am trying to access the trailer for a movie but unable to locate the menu item to play a trailer. If the little play button on the top right corner is meant to be the trailer icon, then pressing it produces “Unfortunately, Mizuu has stopped”. I have also tried using an .nfo file and Mizuu crashes again when this icon is pressed.

Sorry for a noob question. I’ve done the trakt sync thing, but see no change on my trakt page. Is it supposed to upload info to my trakt account? In which section of trakt can I see this? BTW I have only movies, no TV shows.

It depends on what kind of changes you’ve made. If you’ve marked movies as watched, they’ll go under History on Trakt. If you’ve added favourites, you’ll find them in Ratings at Trakt, and Watchlist is called the same on Trakt 🙂

Yes, I even deleted it and reinstall the app just to make sure. Once I remove the year, it works fine, but the year causes the no movies to be found and the cover to be blank. I went through and removed most of the years on my movies, just so that it would locate the cover. Is there any special naming rules that I need to follow when
adding the year?

Honestly, that makes no sense. It was fixed in 2.2, and I have no issues with the filenames you’ve mentioned. Both are working as expected. I also haven’t heard from anyone else having issues with this after 2.2. Regarding naming conventions, that should be fine, so I’m a bit baffled at the moment.

Well then I don’t think I’m doing anything wrong so I am baffled at the situation also especially when no one else is having the problem. And I’ve tried it on two tablets (Toshiba & Asus) and got the same results. Here are just some of the movies that it cannot find with the year: Aliens Vs Predator Requiem (2008), Avp Alien Vs Predator (2004).mp4, Expendables 2 (2012).mp4, Fast Five (2011).mp4, Fun With Dick And Jane (2006).mp4, Karate Kid (1984), Karate Kid (2010), The Adjustment Bureau (2011).mp4 and that’s just a few of the ones that it cannot find. It does find some but very little and some of the ones that it did work for was: Act Of Valor (2012).mp4, Lincoln (2012).mp4, Prometheus (2012).mp4. Maybe you can take a look at see what the problem could be or play with those names and tell me your results.

Sorry but TV is a mess. It feels like a whole different app, great on Movies but awful on TV. I can’t recognize most of my series.

Some of the problems:
– I have to manually substitute dots by spaces in the name of the series to be recognized.
– There are no “files available” option like in Movies so the app shows all the series I have in all my external disks.
– I manually tried to identify unidentified files but they just disappear afterwards.
– When I select some series the app just crashes.

I’m not home right now, so I don’t have access to my PC, but your issues sound rather weird. Mizuu replaces dots with spaces on its own, so that’s not needed. Disappearing episodes is pretty weird as well, haven’t heard of that before. Would be cool if you could describe it in details, so I can try to reproduce it.

Regarding available files in TV shows, it’s immensely hard to do. It could potentially mean having to check the availability of thousands of files before showing the shows with available files. That can take a long time to do. That’s the only reason why it hasn’t been implemented yet.

As for the crash, please report it along with a description of what you were doing, so I know what the crash log is related to.

Thanks for your answer MIchell, you’re an exemple of how to interact with your community! Some issues:

Movies:

– Some small words are not recognized and I can’t identify some movies like “If….” or “To be or not to be”. It’s not really important just a small issue.
– When there are two movies with the same name sometimes Mizuu makes the worst choice, maybe you can use popularity of the movie to choose between releases. Minor issue as well.

Series

I understand that series identification can be harsh but now that movies is really good maybe you can concentrate on that. XBMC makes a decent job.

– The manual identification routine feels completely different from the movies section are you sure it’s the same code? As I mentioned dots must be manually substituted by spaces in order to Mizuu to identify the show. Real example: “Simon.Schamas.Shakespeare” is not identified but “Simon Schamas Shakespeare” is.

– I tried to manually simultaneously identify both episodes of a show but when I came back to the show page only one was displayed. This happens maybe because no data about the season and episode number is added. Problems occur as well when I’m simultaneously adding episodes to a existing series.

I think the movie-related issues are somewhat to blame on the movie database that Mizuu uses. There’s nothing in the code to ignore small words or anything like that, so that’s likely the database. The database should order the results by a number of factors, including popularity. In cases where it’s the same title, it’s always best to include the release year in the filename.

As for TV shows, it was something that was added to Mizuu a little over a year ago. It’s significantly more advanced than movies, and I do realize that it’s an area that could use quite a few improvements. I am however sure that it does replaces dots (and many other signs) with spaces.

Manual identification of shows – at the moment – kind of sucks. Sorry about that. The code is pretty poor and it’s very much a temporary solution at the moment. I was in a bit of a rush when I did that part of Mizuu, and instead of rewriting the whole area to make it better, I only added to the complexity to get it out there faster. I do have a re-write planned and it’s pretty high priorty.

Thanks for this update! I like this app very much and was glad to purchase it!

But one bug I reconized makes it quite unusable for me at the moment:

-> Playback of .mkv file does not work. Tested with several players.
All other file formats work fine.

The .mkvs are stored on my NAS and discovered without any problems.
When i try to play them with one of my players in android out of mizuu (and only out of mizuu) the players seems to start hanging in a queue and never plays the file. It’s trying to load it constantly.

A bug fix would be really necessairy for me, as most of my media files are stores as .mkvs

I tested it now with my Nexus 4 and it works fine. But I intend to use Mizuu on my Tablet as Media Center and there i ran into those issues:

– I am running the most current version of CM9 on a HP touchpad

– Additionally Mizuu crashes every time when i switch categories between Movies / TV Series / Watchlist:
This happens only if i switch directly between those local categories (but reproducable every time). If i go from a local category to one of the online categories and then back to another local one, this works fine and is a workaround where i get no crashes.

– I tried removing and readding library, wiping data, reinstalling and removed all other media apps…nothing changes for me :/

That explains the crashes when switching between the different libraries. That’s a known issue, although I have no idea why it happens. It’s device dependant and I can’t reproduce it on any of my devices.

I’m actually working on improving support with BubbleUPnP at the moment, so the changes there will be in the next beta / release version. No ETA at the moment.

I’m basically working on improving compatibility. Some technical stuff.

I’m not really a fan of the idea, though. Mizuu creates a connection to the SMB share and runs a virtual server locally on your device. What you’re then trying to do is offer that video stream to BubbleUPnP, which has to read it and then serve it as well using the same network. SMB has pretty poor throughput to begin with, so adding a second network service to serve the video stream isn’t really ideal.

Yes, I like to use Mizuu to navigate to other movies actors have played in. Then I stumble on a movie I’d like to watch, I’d like to give me a reminder to watch that movie in the future. Trakt.tv’s watchlist is where I store movies for future watch. So if Mizuu can upload that info and add the movie to trakt’s watchlist, it would be great.

When you say it’s already there for movies that are in my library, can you elaborate? I can only see a “Favorites” button, but is this related to my trakt account?

Finally, I’d love the possibility to see my trakt’s watchlist in a Mizuu interface. I really like the serendipity that Mizuu gives to navigate across actors’ past movies, etc., to discover new movies.

Ever thought of making Mizuu more 2.0, eg “Users from the Mizuu community who liked this movie also liked movie xyz”?

Favorite, Add to watchlist and Mark as watched are all synced with Trakt when viewing movie details.

Mixing local content and web content iis something I’d like to do at some point, but as you can imagine, that kind of stuff is really hard to do. It’s even harder to do it right, so it isn’t complicated for users to use.

I do like the idea of a community-based service, but again – that’s a lot of work, and people will have to register with a service that allows for that kind of stuff. I’m not saying it isn’t coming, but it’ll take time.

Sure, I am not saying it’s easy. For the community-based service, I am just suggesting that Mizzu users could agree to have their data anonymously uploaded to Mizuu servers to share the data. But maybe you don’t have servers for that at this stage of your company.

“Add to watchlist” -> I just discovered it was already in Mizuu for movies in the library, as you pointed out. It is really hard to find, since I can see only an icon that’s not very intuitive. I suggest you add “Add to watchlist” in the menu below “Mark as watched”.

Definitely the ability to “Add to watchlist” for all movies is a must, because I typically want to add to watchlist movies that are not already in my library.

Finally, I am not too familiar with trakt.tv, but where do favorites go in trakt?